Early Man

Voices of: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Timothy Spall, Miriam Margolyes, Rob Brydon, Kayvan Novak, Richard Ayoade
Directed by: Nick Park
Rating: PG
Genre: Animation, Adventure, Comedy
2018

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: A group of cavemen must defeat a group of bronze age people in soccer to save their homeland.

Review:

Tim: When you hear someone say, "Hollywood has run out of ideas", just point out the fact that in 2018, they made an animated cavemen soccer movie. To clarify, this is indeed an idea. Not a particularly good one, but that wasn't stressed. I have to give Early Man credit for one of the more unique movie premises I've seen. Cavemen verses Bronze Age in soccer (or football, whatever). That's certainly not something we've seen dozens of times before. Unfortunately, this is a pretty stupid movie.

One of the biggest complaints I had is that the main characters weren't all that interesting. It's like the film assumes we will automatically care about them, without giving us any reason to. They're cavemen (and cavewomen) and they're pretty stupid. But they are a family, I guess? None of the characters were especially interesting or memorable. Dug is the main character, but I honestly couldn't tell you anything of substance about him, other than he's a caveman who learns to play soccer and has a pet. A significant amount of work needed to go into character development. Lord Nooth is the bad guy because he's bad. The most compelling character was Goona (and you better believe I'm looking these names up on iMDB, I have no recollection of these forgettable characters' names). At least she was torn between two words, excluded from one because she's a girl and accepted in the other because they were desperate. She had dreams and pursued them, even at the risk of everything. All the other characters had pretty simplistic motives. The whole film just felt lazily written.

I opened this review with a good-natured jest about the zany premise, but in reality, the story is pretty absurd. The film opens with us learning about the cavemen and their society. Then we learn that it's the Bronze Age and they are a relic of the past. The story momentarily seems quite interesting- it's setting up a past vs. present dilemma, two eras clashing together. And then, the film introduces soccer and things just get weird. The Bronze Agers challenge the Cavemen to a soccer match and I honestly lost even more interest. The rest of the story plays out about as predictably as it could. I honestly wondered who the film was geared towards. Not young children. Would older children really care about cavemen? They wouldn't understand the Bronze Age people, except as "bad guys". The film isn't clever or funny enough for adults. The whole thing really comes across as an abject failure. The movie made just over $8 million domestically, so it indeed bombed.

I guess the voice cast was decent. Eddie Redmayne was fine as Dug. I have no faults with Tom Hiddleston as the villain. Maisie Williams did solid work as well. None of them were really outstanding, but they did solid work. I don't have a whole lot to say about them.

I still do like the look and feel of stop motion movies, but that by itself counts for almost nothing. You need compelling characters and a good story and we get neither of those things with Early Man. This was a unique idea, but a bad one.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 5.5



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: The Croods, Chicken Run